Symptoms:
- There are a lot, but the long and the short of it is that when I do get the guest screen resize working it only works correctly on my external monitor, and resizing will frequently send me back to the user login screen. Lots of flickering. And when the screen is very large (full screen or close to it) I can't click on anything — the guest machine doesn't identify any mouse action other than movement.
- VirtualBox: Version 6.1.8 r137981 (Qt5.6.3)
- Host: MacBook Pro / Catalina 10.15.4 / 13-inch / 64-bit / 8GB memory
- External monitor: Acer - SA230 23" IPS LED FHD
- Guest: CentOS 8 / kernel 4.18.0-147.8.1.el8_1.x86_64 / 2400GB memory
- Guest Additions: Version 6.1.8
- Logs are attached
I installed my Guest Additions as per these instructions: https://www.tecmint.com/install-virtual ... el-fedora/
I knew something was off because — although my mouse was no longer captured, and could move freely between host and guest machine windows — I couldn't resize the screen. I could resize the window, leaving empty space around the CentOS Machine's display. Or I could scale it to larger sizes, but it would show pixellated, low-res, and the mouse pointer got really huge.
Some posts on this forum led me to try 1) setting "Maximum Guest Screen Size" to "None" and 2) changing "Graphics Controller" to "VBoxVGA."
If I do only one or the other of these things, nothing changes. If I do both of these things, I can resize my screen. But at what cost?
Firstly, when I select VBoxVGA (or VBoxSVGA, which also seems to work) I get a warning in the Settings screen that says "Invalid settings detected." If I click on it I get a message that says:
So that bugs me a little bit, because if I set it to VMSVGA I can't resize my screen (and it's too small to work on).Display: Screen page:
The virtual machine is configured to use a graphics controller other than the recommended one (VMSVGA). Please consider switching unless you have a reason to keep the currently selected graphics controller.
But once I set Maximum Guest Screen Size to "None" and change Graphics Controller to VBoxVGA it's really no more usable. On either of my monitorsI can't get it larger than 80% of full screen without the mouse button becoming unresponsive. I'd like to use this mostly on my external monitor, but I'd like the flexibility of putting it in either. Whenever it's on my MacBook monitor it shrinks to 50% of the size. Then it frequently goes blank then flashes back to the CentOS user login screen, or will crash and become unresponsive. I can scale it to 200% then, but again if I get anywhere close to 80% of full screen the mouse button becomes unresponsive.
Worst of all, on either monitor the guest screen flickers frequently (usually every time I type any key — it becomes seizure-inducing when I enter a password).
Also worth noting: I thought I'd try "Enable 3D Acceleration," thinking that might at least fix the flickering. But whenever I check "Enable 3D Acceleration" it changes the Graphics Controller back to VMSVGA as soon as I click "OK." And then I can't resize my screen again. So 3D Acceleration is another dead end.
So what I'm left with is that I cannot use this guest machine without resizing the screen because it's too small to be functional.
And then when I get resizing to work I cannot use this guest machine because the screen flickers, and the mouse doesn't work when it's the size of a workspace that's actually workable for me.
So as of right now I can't use this guest machine at all.
Anyone have any idea what I can do to make this work for me?